Phule's Errand

book, the way General Blitzkrieg wants the company run. It’s acting just like that Major Botchup they sent to run the company the last time the captain was away.”

“Whoa, that’s scary,” said Gears. His face turned serious, and he said, “I hate to tell you this, Lieutenant, but I’m afraid this robot’s broke.”

“You’re kidding,” said Armstrong.

“No, really, it’s pretty messed up,” said Gears.

“All right, I believe you, Gears,” said Rembrandt. “Question is, can you fix it so the general can’t tell?-and I mean really fast?”

Gears shrugged. “Robot repair’s a real specialized field. I guess I know my way around the innards of a hoverjeep about as well as anybody in the Legion. I’m not going to tell nobody otherwise. If you want me to fix something else… well, no promises. Maybe Sushi could figure out what’s wrong with it, if he was around. But if this was my robot, I wouldn’t even open the cover. I’d send it right back to the factory. These Andromatic models are supposed to come with lifetime guarantees, I hear tell. You know Captain Jester always buys the best.“

“Yeah, too bad the factory’s a couple dozen parsecs away,” said Armstrong, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. “How about a quick fix? It just has to keep working until the general goes away…”

“Which he isn’t showing any signs of doing, thanks to all the golf matches,” said Rembrandt. “You’d think he’d get tired of the game.”

“He enjoys beating the captain,” said Armstrong, shrugging. “The robot, really, but the general doesn’t know that. Actually, I think the general’s spent so long thinking of Captain Jester as the adversary that winning-and taking a bit of the captain’s money, as well-is a special treat, even if it’s only a game.”

“Makes sense,” admitted Rembrandt, frowning. “But wait a minute… what if the robot started winning all the time?‘

“Well, the robot has been winning, every now and then,” said Armstrong. “Just enough to keep the general from figuring out it’s letting him win the matches.” He gave the robot a long stare, then said, “I’m not sure just what it’s likely to do now. Today it started playing like a world champion. The general’s not going to appreciate that. So we’ve got to fix it…”

“Yeah,” said Rembrandt. “The question is, can we?”

It took Major Sparrowhawk about three milliseconds to notice that General Blitzkrieg was boiling mad. It didn’t take a lot of thought; he pretty much gave it away when he burst in the door, bellowed out a string of curses, and threw his golf bag halfway across the office they’d been assigned on Zenobia Base.

Sparrowhawk wasn’t upset. She’d seen her boss in that condition plenty of times before. Some might even argue that it was the general’s normal mood. Whether it was or not, he’d been in an abnormally pleasant state for nearly two weeks.

She gave a mental shrug and prepared to deal with the situation. That was really the essence of her job as Blitzkrieg’s adjutant: figuring out what to do when the general was so pissed off at the universe that nobody else wanted anything to do with him. Not surprisingly, there weren’t very many other junior Legion officers willing to take on the task. That gave her a fair measure of job security, as well as a quite decent lifestyle back at Rahnsome Base, where most of the Alliance military maintained their general staff and headquarters. Here at Zenobia Base, the lifestyle was another story-although she certainly couldn’t complain about the food.

And, in fact, she’d had more than the usual amount of downtime, with the general concentrating so totally on his golf game. She felt a certain grudging admiration for Captain Jester, who’d had the foresight to build a golf course here, and to entice Blitzkrieg into an apparently endless series of matches. It had certainly kept the general out of her hair. She hadn’t even felt the usual pressure to snoop around the base, compiling a list of the violations, screw-ups, and deficiencies every base commander tried to sweep under the rug when a staff officer came to visit. She had developed a knack for finding sore spots for the general to pounce on once he’d stopped having fun. Well, it looked as if the fun was over-for her as well as for the general. And as much as she’d come to like the people she’d been dealing with on Zenobia, she knew her job.

She reached for her digital notepad. “I think you’ll want to look at this, General,” she said, in a tone of voice carefully modulated to pique his interest rather than add to his annoyance.

“I’ll be damned if I want to look at anything,” roared Blitzkrieg, pretty much the response she’d expected. He plopped himself in the padded desk chair and bellowed, “Pour me a Scotch, damn it!”

“Yes, sir,” said Sparrowhawk, already moving toward the portable bar discreetly installed on one side of the office. She quickly fixed a drink to the general’s usual specifications and carried it over to him. As he took the drink, she set the notepad down on the desk slightly to one side of him and went back to her own desk. It wouldn’t be long before curiosity got the better of him…

In fact, he succumbed to the temptation after his second sip, picking up the notepad and staring at it for a solid minute before growling, “What the hell is this about?”

“Oh, probably nothing important,” said Sparrowhawk, brightly. She took out her laser trimmer and began evening up her fingernails, then said, “I believe it’s some sort of apparatus the Zenobians are running here on the base. I’m not certain what it does, though.”

Blitzkrieg snorted and looked at the notepad again. “Are they allowed to do that?”

“I think the treaty lets them, sir,” said Sparrowhawk. She inspected her left hand. “Captain Jester would certainly know. I think he had a lot to do with the terms of the treaty,” she added.

“Damn thing looks suspicious as hell to me,” said Blitzkrieg. “Some kind of spy apparatus, I’d wager…”

Sparrowhawk looked up with an expression of feigned innocence. “Spy apparatus? Do you really think they’d be snooping on the Alliance?”

“I wouldn’t put anything past the scaly little bastards,” growled the general, peering at the image on Spar- rowhawk’s notepad. “Knew we couldn’t trust ‘em right from the first.”

“Well, whatever this apparatus is, they’ve got it set up right out by the perimeter,“ said Sparrowhawk. ”They aren’t even guarding it. You could probably just walk right up and inspect it.“

Blitzkrieg sipped his drink in silence, nodding slowly. After a moment he said, “Walk right up. Walk right up. You know, Major, I think I’m going to do exactly that.” He stood up and strode forcefully out the door.

Sparrowhawk waited until she’d heard the outside door close behind him, then let out a long sigh of relief. “Well, that ought to keep him out of my hair for a while longer.”

In the view screen, Old Earth was now close enough to show detail from space. It looked much like any developed world: a garland of lights across the nightside, hazed by the no-longer-pristine planetary atmosphere. The shapes of the continents were familiar from hundreds of tri-vee dramas, the stock establishing shot for what usually turned out to be the inspiring tale of an idealistic youngster struggling against the ancient, rigidly stratified society where every tiny gesture was an irrevocable status marker, and where raw talent came in a distant third to graft and nepotism. Having come from a family where he was a lifelong beneficiary of graft and nepotism, Phule had never been able to take such stories very seriously.

So Phule looked at the panorama with jaded eyes; he’d set foot on too many different worlds in the last few weeks, each at first promising and each at last a disappointment. Just as on Cut ‘N’ Shoot, Rot’n‘art, and Hix’s World, he was best advised to put aside his preconceptions and take Old Earth for what it was.

On the other hand, maybe Old Earth would be different. If you could believe the tourist brochures and guidebooks, it was the original home world from which the human race had spread out into the galaxy. But even if that was true, Phule didn’t see how it made any difference to his search.

All he wanted here was to catch up with Beeker, the right-hand man he’d taken for granted until events had proved just how indispensable he was. And when he’d found the butler, and gotten his Port-a-Brain, he’d gladly shake the dust of the home world of humanity from his shoes and return to Omega Company.

The speaker crackled, and a pleasant (if somewhat bored) female voice said, “All passengers for Old Earth please report to the shuttle boarding area. There will be three landing shuttles; the first will depart at eight- twenty-five, Galactic Standard Time, and will accept passengers from cabins eleven through forty-five…”

That would be the landing group he was in, Phule realized. He shouldered his duffel bag and headed toward the shuttle boarding area, which was just abaft the last row of first-class cabins.

He was three-quarters of the way to his destination when a stateroom door just to his left flew open just as he went past, and the occupant barged directly into him. They both went sprawling, and Phule looked up to see a pair of green eyes framed by bright red hair looking down at him. The eyes went wide with surprise, and a lush